Authors: Alex and Luci, transgender people
Part of the transgender experience is fighting systemic oppression that seeks to alienate the community from basic human rights. The government trying to silence and oppress gender-diverse people is not a recent issue – the United States has been regressing their rights at an extreme pace in the past years.
Transgender rights have been the target of a deliberate and coordinated assault by the new US Administration since it took office in January 2025. In the name of “protecting children” and “protecting cisgender women’s rights in bathrooms and sports competitions”, the Trump administration has attempted to undermine and reverse previous legal protections and inclusive social norms through executive orders, regulatory changes, and divisive rhetoric.
“The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security is releasing this third Red Flag Alert for the USA related to the Trump Administration’s anti-trans initiatives, which have continued to expand nationwide since our last Red Flag Alert (RFA) on this subject. Over the eight months since the second RFA’s publication, the Republican Party’s anti-trans agenda has radicalized and continued to intensify. 2025 was the sixth consecutive record-breaking year for the number of anti-trans bills considered across the country. There was a 45 percent increase in bills between 2024 and 2025. Between 2021 and 2025, the number of bills in consideration has increased by 668 percent.”
This constitutes the third Red Flag Alert for the Anti-Trans Genocide in the USA.
So what are the laws targeting transgender people?
Recognizing people as only women or men
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an order that marked a significant shift in the way his administration would handle the rights of transgender people. The order seeks to question transgender identities by saying the government would recognize only two, unchangeable sexes: female and male.
“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.”
Travel and visa restrictions
From the same order that explicitly only recognises two “fixed” sexes, transgender people’s passports are now issued only under their birth sex, regardless if they had already changed their gender marker prior to the order. This has also withdrawn non-binary people’s ability to select “X” instead of “F” or “M”.
The US State Department has ordered officials around the world to issue permanent visa bans to people who are thought to have misrepresented their birth sex on visa applications and to refuse visas to transgender athletes who are trying to travel to the US for sporting events.
Moreover, the states of Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Florida and Tennessee have begun invalidating driver’s licenses due to this exact reason.
Denying healthcare
On January 28, 2025, the Executive Order titled “Protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation” stated the following:
“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.”
Under this order, the government is mandated to cease funding to hospitals and universities providing gender-affirming care to people under the age of 19 years. The main target was denying young transgender patients puberty blockers (which are widely used for cisgender children to treat early puberty without any issues), hormone replacement therapy, and gender-affirming surgery, all of which have been confirmed to improve mental health and lower suicidality.
Education rollbacks
Just a day later, on January 29, 2025, the “Ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling” order was signed. It affirms the following:
“(…) In recent years (…) parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight. Such an environment operates as an echo chamber, in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination. (…) In other instances, young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed.”
This order prohibits schools from offering LGBTQI+ inclusive curricula or teaching about gender diversity, along with certain teachings about race. It demands that the federal government keeps an eye on the curriculum and threatens to withhold funding if schools use transgender students’ preferred names or pronouns and permit them to use gender-neutral restrooms.
Bathroom bans
The Kansas State Legislature passed a bathroom ban in late January 2026 that includes a reward for Americans who track down transgender people using gender-appropriate restrooms; anyone who spots a suspected trans person in a restroom may file a civil lawsuit against them.
By financially rewarding those who engage in harassment, such laws encourage persecution of transgender people who “dare” to exist in public. Additionally, it guarantees the harassment of non-trans people whom the self-appointed gender police suspect of being trans for any reason.
This is only a short summary of some of the anti-trans Executive Orders coming from the Trump administration, however, individual states can pass their own legislation that further targets gender-diverse people, setting a dangerous tendency among both officials and citizens to target and discriminate.
These discriminatory laws don’t just create significant obstacles and challenges for transgender people – they pose a profound threat to their health and lives, exposing them to both direct and indirect risks of harm. Encouraging harassment and removing legal protection will inevitably lead to the rise of hate crime cases, which, in its turn, will force a lot of transgender people into isolation, leading to hightened rates of depression, anxiety, and, ultimately, a higher suicide rate.
It’s important to understand that protection of trangender rights is, in its essence, protection of human rights, as transgender people are no different from the rest of the population, and a state that is allowed to oppress minorities is only one small step away from oppressing its entire nation. This further highlights the profound benefit of fostering equality, which helps create a better world not only for the marginalized groups, but for everyone regardless of their identity.
Transgender rights violations under the Trump Administration
